Blogs for Libraries

"Some of you are probably thinking that no one will read what you have to say. When I started my blog, Open Stacks, I shared your skepticism. As it turns out, no matter who you are and what you write about, there will be others who share your interests. I was surprised to discover that, as a librarian, you already have a built-in community of people interested in you and your perspective. You can, and probably will, meet people that you may not have met otherwise, becoming part of a very progressive segment of the LIS community....

Blogs are perfect for this kind of information dissemination as the system of dated entries makes it easy for viewers to identify new content. The Suburban Library System has gone so far as to make a blog the central content of their home page. A number of the system's libraries have caught the fever as well. Librarians at St. Joseph County Public Library in South Bend, Indiana are being encouraged to use their respective knowledge domains to publish topical blogs. So far, they offer a Book Blog and a Sights and Sounds Blog. Notice that blogs can represent both the collective voice of the organization and the diversity of the individuals that comprise it." [Webjunction, via Open Stacks]

Thanks for the shout outs, Greg! SLS is quite proud to be the first Library System in Illinois to blogify its home page. :-)

What I really wanted to highlight from the article, though, is Greg's observation that new librarian bloggers generally have a "built-in audience" right off the bat. Of course, this isn't true of just librarian blogs but of other professional and topical blogs as well. However, blogging is all about community, and unlike some of these other professions, librarians are all about community, in pretty much every context of the word. It's a natural fit.

"Practical advice from John Seyfarth, in the Nebraska Library Association Quarterly Vol. 34, No 2, Summer 2003 p.17-18, on hardware, software, and installation that will make a computer, along with its applications, speak Spanish." [What's Gnu?]

Welcome to TechWatch

"Bloggers love to talk about how this RSS-empowered medium is changing journalism forever. What's already clear to me is that blogs and 'traditional' news journalism are ideal partners for delivering, aggregating and analyzing news.

For example, I'm subscribed to around 50 RSS feeds that deliver content to my news aggregator on a daily basis. What's happening here is that you quickly notice patterns where breaking news around the web feeds blog discussions, and vice versa. So in that context, Tech Watch is a natural fit for InfoWorld's news team. Expect to see us blog from events like trade shows, and link to enterprise IT news around the web with our spin. Some of us might even try to be funny (but don't hold your breath).

So what makes Tech Watch unique?

1. Every InfoWorld news reporter has been issued a username and password for posting to this site.

2. Some news stories will get blogged, others will run in the news section. If we develop a formula for exactly how those decisions are made I'll let you know.

4. The copy desk is cut out of the loop. Goodbye production latency, and hello group editing!" [InfoWorld, via Jon's Radio]

It will be interesting to watch how these reporters decide what is "news" and what is a blog entry. Will InfoWorld's famous RSS ads run in blog entries, too? And how does the copy desk (and the higher-ups) feel about being cut out of the loop? When InfoWorld evaluates this project in a few months, what will the consequences of cutting out the copy desk be? Will there be extra rewards or recognition (internally or externally) for those reporters that post more (or less) to the blog than to the news section?

InfoWorld is definitely doing some interesting things these days....